Doomsday Clock

BloodOmen

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http://www.cbsnews.com/news/doomsday-clock-moves-two-minutes-closer-to-midnight/

"Last Updated Jan 22, 2015 12:51 PM EST

The iconic Doomsday Clock, considered a metaphor for the dangers faced by the world, was pushed ahead by two minutes over concerns about worsening climate change and the world's failure to reduce nuclear weapons, a trans-Atlantic group of prominent scientists announced.

Every year, the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists analyzes international threats, particularly nuclear arsenals and climate change, and decides where the minute hand on the Doomsday Clock should rest. The closer it is to midnight, the closer the world is to doom.

The last time the clock moved was in 2012 when the Board set the minute hand at 11:55 p.m. over concerns about the state of nuclear arsenals around the world. It also was concerned about the Fukushima nuclear meltdown and the outbreak of H5N1 flu. It hasn't moved this much since 2007, when the Board warned that "the world stands on the brink of a second nuclear age." It also cited climate change which it called "a dire challenge to humanity."

Those two issues again took center stage as the Board announced it would bump the clock two minutes ahead, to 11:57 p.m.

"Today, unchecked climate change and a nuclear arms race resulting from modernization of huge arsenals pose extraordinary and undeniable threats to the continued existence of humanity," Kennette Benedict, executive director of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, told reporters. "And world leaders have failed to act with the speed or on the scale required to protect citizens from potential catastrophe. These failures of leadership endanger every person on Earth."

The Board was especially critical of world leaders for failing to take the actions necessary to keep temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F) over what they were in preindustrial times, which most scientists contend would avert the worst impacts of climate change, such as widespread droughts, heat waves and flooding.

World leaders are set to meet later this year in Paris to ink a deal to combat climate change beginning in 2020. But many critics argue it comes too late and won't have the teeth necessary to facilitate a shift away from fossil fuels that are blamed for much of the increase in greenhouse gas emissions.

"Steps seen as bold in light of today's extremely daunting political opposition to climate action do not even match the expectations of five years ago, to say nothing of the scientific necessity," said Sivan Kartha, a member of the Board and a senior scientist at the Stockholm Environment Institute.

"The results are unsurprising. Global greenhouse gas emission rates are now 50 percent higher than they were in 1990," he said. "Emission rates have risen since 2000 by more than in the previous three decades combined. Investments have continued to pour into fossil fuel infrastructure at a rate that exceeds $1 trillion per year, with additional hundreds of billions of dollars in continued fossil fuel subsidies. We can and must turn this around."

The Board also said the United States and Russia weren't doing enough to reduce their nuclear arsenals, while warning that other countries not part of the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons such as India, Pakistan, Israel, are expanding or modernizing theirs.

"Since the end of the Cold War, there has been cautious optimism about the ability of nuclear weapon states to keep the nuclear arms race in check and to walk back slowly from the precipice of nuclear destruction," said Sharon Squassoni, a Board member and director and senior fellow at the Proliferation Prevention Program, Center for Strategic and International Studies. "That optimism has essentially evaporated in the face of two trends: sweeping nuclear weapons modernization programs and a disarmament machinery that has ground to a halt."

The Board called on the world cap to greenhouse gas emissions, dramatically reduce proposed spending on nuclear weapons modernization programs, re-energize the disarmament process and deal with nuclear waste.

"We are not saying its too late to take action but the window for action is closing rapidly," Benedict said. "The world needs to be awakened from its lethargy and start making changes. We move the clock hand today to inspire action and move that process along."

The Doomsday Clock is the invention of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, a publication started by some of the researchers who worked on the atomic bomb. The wife of one of these researchers, Martyl Langsdorf, was a painter. In 1947, she illustrated the first Bulletin cover to feature the Doomsday Clock set at that point at 11:53 p.m.

Langsdorf died in March 2013, but her creation keeps on ticking.

The closest the Doomsday Clock has ever come to midnight was in 1953, when the minute hand ticked to 11:58 p.m. after the first test of the hydrogen bomb. It was at its most optimistic in 1991, when the Bulletin board set the time at 17 minutes to midnight as the Cold War ended.

Since 1991, however, the clock has been ticking gradually toward doom, as it became clear that total nuclear disarmament would not be happening."
 

Moriath

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If we die we die. Won't know much about it. What gives humans a pass over everything else. We will all be dead sometime. Sooner or later doesn't really matter. Cause when it happens nothing we know will exist.

It would be interesting to experience when it happens. Till it effects me when I will be oblivious to it anyway.

Thing is we have been recording temps for 100 years or so. Cosmic blink of an eye. So a lot of this is conjecture anyway.
 

BloodOmen

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Assuming all this is true, its neigh impossible to correct, greedy corps aren't simply going to stop making money, even if the possibility of imminent death is slapping them in the face - money is utterly worthless if we're all dead.

The only way we're going to correct this (again assuming this is all true) is if every single government on the planet gets together and basically says "Your going to stop cutting forests down, drilling for oil and overloading your country with factories producing XYZ smog/carbon etc or we're all dead") that's literally the only way it'll be fixed or remedied to the point where it starts to correct itself over time.

Let's face it, that is never going to happen
 

Moriath

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Assuming all this is true, its neigh impossible to correct, greedy corps aren't simply going to stop making money, even if the possibility of imminent death is slapping them in the face - money is utterly worthless if we're all dead.

The only way we're going to correct this (again assuming this is all true) is if every single government on the planet gets together and basically says "Your going to stop cutting forests down, drilling for oil and overloading your country with factories producing XYZ smog/carbon etc or we're all dead") that's literally the only way it'll be fixed or remedied to the point where it starts to correct itself over time.

Let's face it, that is never going to happen
I'm not looking to correct anything. As I said its conjecture from 100 years of data from a planet that's 5million years old. But even if we bite the bullet it's not all bad. Every species seems to have its day. We just have the intelligence to think oh fuck.
 

DaGaffer

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I'm not looking to correct anything. As I said its conjecture from 100 years of data from a planet that's 5million years old. But even if we bite the bullet it's not all bad. Every species seems to have its day. We just have the intelligence to think oh fuck.

Humans are nothing if not adaptable. Short of the Sun going nova, I'm a big believer in our ability to find a way.
 

Mabs

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Humans are nothing if not adaptable. Short of the Sun going nova, I'm a big believer in our ability to find a way.

what about one that doesnt involve a special religious book in one hand and a gun in the other ?
 

old.Tohtori

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Another arbitrary human concept to scare people into submission and keep a couple of thousand folks in useless jobs. Not to mention the whole scam of; It used to be "miracle tonic", today it's "climate change".

Take the money paid to these doomsday clock folks and fix a few other problems like hunger and homeless.

Short version? Bullcrap.
 
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Raven

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Er. Maybe you should research what it actually is first?
 

old.Tohtori

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Well put, many braincells. If you have something to say against it, then do so, stop making monkey noises and beating around the bush.
 

Bodhi

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I actually agree with Toht here, more "The Sky is Falling, repent, repent" nonsense from the Climate Change lot. The climate's been changing since year dot, and we've adapted to it pretty well in the past, I fail to see how it will be any different in future.
 

Raven

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It has nothing at all to do with the "climate change lot" it is various factors that decide the time on the clock, political turmoil, wars, natural events etc.

However, climate change is happening, no question about that, it is in constant flux and man has very little control over it (despite what the nut cutlet brigade will have people believe) and it will have an effect on people in the future and may well end up causing wars.

A bit more sunshine isn't going to wipe out the human race.
 

Bodhi

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OK, well the Doomsday lot need their heads looking at then if they think changes int he climate are going to bring about the end of the world, as they just won't.
 

old.Tohtori

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Climate change lot and doomsday clock, different matters, but in this instance connected as per topic post.

My original post commented on both, didn't mean to say doomsday clock folk are just climate change folk. Hope that clears it @Raven and sorry if it came across in another manner.
 

DaGaffer

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I generally have a problem with the whole principle of the Doomsday Clock, in much the same way I'm not too keen on religious Apocalyptics. Fuckers all seem a bit too keen to be proved right.
 

Bodhi

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Prof Lindzen Dismisses Silly Cults

An MIT professor of meteorology is dismissing global-warming alarmists as a discredited “cult” whose members are becoming more hysterical as emerging evidence continues to contradict their beliefs. During an appearance on this writer’s radio show Monday, MIT Professor emeritus Richard Lindzen discussed the religious nature of the movement.

“As with any cult, once the mythology of the cult begins falling apart, instead of saying, oh, we were wrong, they get more and more fanatical. I think that’s what’s happening here. Think about it,” he said. “You’ve led an unpleasant life, you haven’t led a very virtuous life, but now you’re told, you get absolution if you watch your carbon footprint. It’s salvation!”

Lindzen, 74, has issued calm dismissals of warmist apocalypse, reducing his critics to sputtering rage. Last week, government agencies including NASA announced that 2014 was the “hottest year” in “recorded history,” as The New York Times put it in an early edition. Last year has since been demoted by the Times to the hottest “since record-keeping began in 1880.”

But that may not be true. Now the same agencies have acknowledged that there’s only a 38 percent chance that 2014 was the hottest year on record. And even if it was, it was only by two-100ths of a degree. Lindzen scoffs at the public-sector-generated hysteria, which included one warmist blogger breathlessly writing that the heat record had been “shattered.”

“Seventy percent of the earth is oceans, we can’t measure those temperatures very well. They can be off a half a degree, a quarter of a degree. Even two-10ths of a degree of change would be tiny but two-100ths is ludicrous. Anyone who starts crowing about those numbers shows that they’re putting spin on nothing.”

Last week, after scoffing at Vermont socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders’ call for a Senate vote on global warming, Lindzen was subjected to another barrage of diatribes. At his listed MIT phone number, Prof. Lindzen received a typical anonymous call: “I think people like you should actually be in jail,” the male caller told him, “because you must know where this is all leading now… the people you support and take your money from to make these outrageously anti-human comments (also ‘know’)… In other words, you’re a sociopath!”

Lindzen chuckled when the voicemail was replayed.

This writer asked him if, as has been alleged in some of the warmist blogs, he is taking money from the energy industry. “Oh, it would be great!” he said with a laugh. “You have all these people, the Gores and so on, making hundreds of millions of dollars on this, Exxon Mobil giving $100 million to Stanford for people who are working on promoting this hysteria. The notion that the fossil-fuel industry cares – they don’t. As long as they can pass the costs on to you, it’s a new profit center.”

Lindzen said he was fortunate to have gained tenure just as the “climate change” movement was beginning, because now non-believers are often ostracized in academia. In his career he has watched the hysteria of the 1970’s over “global cooling” morph into “global warming.”

“They use climate to push an agenda. But what do you have left when global warming falls apart? Global normalcy? We have to do something about ‘normalcy?’” As for CO2, Lindzen said that until recently, periods of greater warmth were referred to as “climate optimum.” Optimum is derived from a Latin word meaning “best.”

“Nobody ever questioned that those were the good periods. All of a sudden you were able to inculcate people with the notion that you have to be afraid of warmth.” The warmists’ ultimate solution is to reduce the standard of living for most of mankind. That proposition is being resisted most vigorously by nations with developing economies such as China and India, both of which have refused to sign on to any restrictive, Obama-backed climate treaties. Lindzen understands their reluctance.

“Anything you do to impoverish people, and certainly all the planned policies will impoverish people, is actually costing lives. But the environmental movement has never cared about that.”

Howie Carr, Boston MA, 21 January 2015

Interesting comments from an IPCC contributor on the ludicrousness of it all - also available in the Daily Fail, but I'd rather not go there :)
 

leggy

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A bit more sunshine isn't going to wipe out the human race.

4C might not kill us but it will seriously impact our food supply.

Cue: Famine, disease, mass migration of humans, fighting, APOCALYPSE!!!
 

Bodhi

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Considering the "rise" since 1880 is around 0.8C (and has been precisely zero in the last 17 years), I don't see the 4C number happening any time soon.

Or at all, for that matter.
 

Job

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How the fuk can they include climate change when nothing measurable has been affected by the miniscule amount that may or may not have happened and can be conclusivly attributed to AGW.
Nowhere has sunk under the waves and deserts keep growing at the normal rate, crop disasters come and go as usual.
It MAY happen...but we MAY be hit by an asteroid.
 

Raven

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Sea levels are lower than they should be. The earth doesn't care that we have built right up to the edge or along river banks.

We simply cannot pause nature, regardless of how much the bean munchers want us to.
 

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